Bush adheres to presidential infallibility

MICHAEL TACKETT

If there is one thing you can count on from President Bush it is his unyielding sense of certainty. Just consider again his justifications for going to war with Iraq. He said there were strong links between the Al Qaeda terrorist network and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

He said Hussein's regime possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and could well provide them to terrorists who might do harm to the United States. He said there was also evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear weapons material.

We now have the benefit of something that we didn't have before, namely hard facts and ground truth. Most notably it comes from the presidential commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a panel that is decidedly bipartisan and had the most complete access to relevant information about that infamous day.

The commission staff said in the last week that there were in fact no "operational" ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

We also know that weapons inspectors who have surveyed postwar Iraq have found scant evidence of weapons of mass destruction. While it is possible that such weapons remain hidden or were spirited out of Iraq before the end of, as the president might say, "major combat operations," the record suggests that this leg of the stool to justify war is creaky at best.

The closest the president comes to a concession is over whether Iraq tried to obtain nuclear material from the African nation of Niger. The commission report actually gave the president cover. He could have said that he was relying on the best intelligence available at the time when he made his decision, and that unfortunately the information proved to be incorrect.

Instead, the president insists that the Al Qaeda ties were there and were an ample rationale for launching the first pre-emptive war in U.S. history, one without the backing of key American allies in Europe.

Dutiful Vice President Dick Cheney continues to echo the president's line, even furiously so by blaming the media for misreporting the commission's findings.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Bush told reporters after a Cabinet meeting last week.

Shading words

Bush markets himself as a plain-talking Texan. When he parses as he did over the meaning of "contacts" or "relationship," he sounds more like a predecessor who once said there were multiple definitions for the word "is."

And it reinforces perhaps Bush's most troubling tendency, which is to avoid in almost every instance conceding that he was wrong. Far from saying that he had made a mistake, the president continues to raise the specter of the so far non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

In speech after speech and in question-and-answer sessions, Bush reprises the line that Hussein had used chemical weapons on his own people, meaning some 14 years ago.

Not exactly a fresh threat.

Perhaps he can take heart from the fact that a majority of Americans remain resolute about their support for the war in Iraq, even if the predicates for the conflict have been shown to be false. But those numbers likely reflect a support for the U.S. troops in harm's way more than they do an embrace of the president.

Because the reasons that the president gave for going to war have seemed to nearly all melt away, it is tempting to think about some of the early criticism of his decision, namely that he was trying to settle a highly personal score. He stoked that criticism recently by trotting out as a totem a personal gun of Hussein's that was recovered by Army Delta Force troops when Hussein was apprehended.

Bush proudly said that he keeps the gun in his office.

"It's now the property of the U.S. government," he said.

And he used the occasion to again reprise his bill of particulars against Hussein, that Hussein was a torturer and a dictator capable of unspeakable deeds that defy humanity. One of those deeds was a failed effort to kill Bush's father.

Getting his way

Bush's messages have sunk in. Before the commission revealed its findings, most Americans indeed believed that Saddam Hussein was in part responsible for Sept. 11. The commission so far has brought clarity; the president has brought certainty.